Transcript of Video Titled “Massage Chair Industry Update – June 11, 2020”
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Alan: Hi, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com‘ and today is our biweekly massage chair industry update for Thursday, June 11th, 2020. The Covid virus continues to rage in our country, and it has affected business, my business and other businesses. All of our showrooms are closed to, with our regular hours. We are open by appointment only to try to minimize the number of people or customers that can come in to the showroom at one time, and so far we, you know, we manage to schedule appointments a couple hours apart, but we have noticed a drop in the number of people that do come to the showrooms, and of course, that makes sense with the fear of transmission of the virus. I think it’s very, very precautionary right now. Things are starting to open up, but we are seeing some second wave spikes of the virus, we are here in Utah, and so it’s still a very, very careful time. Also, there’s a tremendous amount of civil unrest right now with the death of George Floyd in Minnesota, and that has kind of infiltrated our psyche as well. I know it’s affected me quite a bit, you know, I don’t think a lot about, you know, and maybe, and I’m kind of embarrassed to say this, coming from Canada, we, it was not a real issue. Racism was not a huge issue with the black population as much as it was with the natives, or with the Ukrainians, or Asians, or Indians. There’s definitely racist issues up in Canada, but coming down here and experiencing the, you know, becoming more involved in, over the last – well, I’ve been here since ’88 in the United States – so you know, 30 odd years. It’s a real tender spot, and I know this time it’s affected me a little bit more because I did not really think seriously about, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement, and I didn’t think all that seriously about white privilege. I always used to think that I, you know, I didn’t have white privilege because I was raised in a very poor family in Canada, my mother was on welfare and a seamstress to make ends meet, and I didn’t you know, I didn’t have anything given to me, you know, cars, or education. I had to pay for everything, and even in my practice, when I opened up, I started my chiropractic practice, I had to go out and ask for money to start my practice, because no bank would lend me the money. And so, I didn’t fully understand, didn’t understand white privilege, and my son, at school, is confronted with that topic. Not recently, but over his three years of high school, that topic has come up a number of times, and he hasn’t been quite sure, it was almost an accusatory, and he didn’t know how to defend himself, and we discussed it. But I realize now that I probably have it wrong. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I understand very little of it, as a matter of fact, I know I do, and I’m pretty sure that some of my thoughts and my understandings before were off base a bit. And so, my family is in various and sundry ways trying to understand more about the Black Lives Matter movement, to learn more about the discrimination in our country, and become more sensitive to it because quite honestly, I didn’t understand, and I still don’t fully understand, you know, what it really is all about. But I am eager to learn and I have one daughter, in particular, her and I talk regularly about it and we’re purchasing books, or we have purchased books that discuss the history, and it’s something that I really feel like I need to become much more aware of. So, anyway, that’s, I didn’t mean to get in to any kind of a, any kind of a commentary, but there it is, and anyway, I just, it’s just been something that’s been on my heart. The pandemic has been a huge thing that’s affected all of us, and now the racial injustice is a big thing, and so these are things that are just coming on from all angles, and these are things that we need to take seriously. Anyway, and then, add to that, I’m going in for a colonoscopy today. This is my third one in 10 years, and by golly, it’s maybe a little bit, a lighter topic, but you know, a colonoscopy is kind of a funny thing, when you think about it, kind of almost a little bit of a joke, and if you’re over 50, it’s not a joke, you know, there’s a very popular sports-and-outdoor commentator here, a television-and-radio commentator here in Utah that died a number of years ago, before I even turned 50, he died from colon cancer because he never went in for a screening, and a screening, when you turn 50, is quite important. As a matter of fact, a lot of people are getting screened now that are less than 50 because of a history of polyps or gastrointestinal cancer, or whatever, in their family. And so, when I turned 50, I went and got my first colonoscopy, I can’t believe, OK, I didn’t intend to get in to the colonoscopy in great detail either. But anyway, they found polyps, so five years later, I had to come back for another one, and they found more polyps, and so three years later, which is about now, I’m going for another one, and it’s today, and I’ve been on the, I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve taken a, if you’ve ever prepped for a colonoscopy, it’s not very pleasant, the last 24 hours, because you drink this formula, before it was GoLYTELY, and you had to drink like gallons of it mixed with water, or mixed with, water mixed with this delightful chemical, but now they’ve got a new thing called Suprep, which is, they’re just two six-ounce bottles and they’re mixed with water, so you’re drinking two 16-ounce cups. But holy monkey, your innards are going to start churning like they’ve never churned before, and you will be spending a lot of time in one particular room in your house, and so make sure there’s always one of those rooms available to you during that 24-hour period. Well, I’ve got mine in a couple of hours, and I’m kind of in the downward slope of gastrointestinal instability, if you will. I just hope that the doctor’s pleased with what he finds in there, and I don’t just mean polyps, or the healthy colon. I hope he finds a really good clean one, because I paid the price. But anyway, I don’t mean to make light, too light of that because it is a serious issue, and now if you’re over 50, and a lot of our demographic that purchase massage chairs is over 50, please, I encourage you to get a colonoscopy regularly. I believe insurance covers it as a preventative measure every five years. It used to be 10 years if you didn’t have any polyps, but I understand now they’re even decreasing the preventative schedule to once every five years, and if you do have polyps, or any other kind of thing that suggests a concern or a red flag, then it’s three years. So, the long and short of it is, you know, I’ve got, after today, I don’t have to worry about this for at least another three years. But for you, I would strongly encourage getting checked, getting your GI checked with a colonoscopy, make sure you’re healthy and everything’s OK, because it’s something you can’t see. In many cases, you don’t feel it. It’s just something that is preventative, and so I encourage you to do it. Anyway, OK, enough of that. Oh boy, I’ll try to keep the rest of this short because I’ve already spent eight minutes talking about things that have absolutely nothing to do with massage chairs themselves, but things that I think are worth discussing.
[SCREEN TEXT: After 9 Months of Redesigning, our New Massage-Chair-Relief.com Website is Up!!]
Alan: OK, the big news for us at Massage Chair Relief is that our new website went up last, a week ago Thursday, and so it took us nine months to get to where we are, and we finally have the site launched.
[SCREEN TEXT: Education & Support Focus]
Alan: So, if you go to Massage-Chair-Relief.com, you’ll see a whole different user experience there, a whole different look and feel, and in the process of creating this new user experience and this new web design, my focus was primarily on education and support, and those are the two things I think are most crucial for people that are purchasing a massage chair. Education to help pick the right chair, and when you get on the homepage of my website, you’ll see right away, a button that says ‘Five Steps to Choosing, or Finding the Right Massage Chair,’ and so education is huge, and we’ve added, well, the five steps. We’ve added a page that links to our top sellers. We’ve added a page that has, takes all of the customer reviews we’ve had on every product, and every customer review we’ve had on the site, and it all is put together on to one page, and that page is called ‘Customer Reviews.’ So, now you can go to that page and read about reviews about various and sundry chairs, about our store, about us, about me, and hopefully, it’ll help you in your decision to purchase a chair. Also, and in terms of support, we’ve added a whole ‘Support’ tab. We never even had this on our navigation bar across the top of the website. We have a ‘Support’ tab, and in the ‘Support’ tab, we have a page called ‘Problems with Your Chair?’, and we have two options for getting support if something is wrong with your chair, and we don’t want you to think that we’re hiding from you if you do have a problem with your chair. We are right upfront about everything, and we want you to know that we’re there to help you if you have a problem with your chair, because sometimes the ball gets dropped by the massage chair company, or by us, and we have put protocols in place behind the scenes to make sure that that does not happen. So, anyway, and then we also have, on our support page, we have a page that has all the owner’s manuals of every chair, so you don’t have to go searching for those, even though they are on the product pages, the individual product pages. We also have a page that talks about our financing, because we’ve added a new financing option. We still have Synchrony Bank for 0% financing up to 48 months, but now we have Affirm financing, which can give you terms from 0% to, I think, 10% interest, for up to 36 months, and that is actually an online option. So, when you go to the check out page of the shopping cart, after you’ve added your chair to the shopping cart and you go to check out, there will be a credit cart payment option, there will be a PayPal payment option, and now there’s an Affirm financing option, and it will tell you right then and there what your payments would be, and you can get approved in just, you know, I think, three easy steps online. See, with Synchrony Bank, you got fill out a form and send it us, we’ve got to get certain information from you that’s not on the form also, and then we’ve got to submit through the online portal. As of yet, they have not provided us with a link that allows us to have, or allows you to apply for Synchrony Bank financing online. So, Affirm makes that really, really easy. And then, we also have an FAQ section with our most commonly asked questions, and answers, of course. And we have a ‘Contact Us’ page, so if you want to contact either one of the stores individually, or contact the company as a whole, we have our phone numbers, and we have a ‘Contact Us’ form that’s on that page as well. So, anyway, we really have been focusing on the education and the support, and I hope you like the layout. We’ve tried to make it very, very simple. There’s not a lot of flashing sliders, or signs, or advertisements about chair sales. We do have chair sales, don’t get me wrong, but that is not the focus of the homepage when you land on it, the focus is education. And anyway, so let’s see, enough of that.
[SCREEN TEXT: New and Updated Free Report Download]
Alan: Oh, and I’ve updated my ’11 Things Report,’ I have a report that many of you have downloaded, it’s called ‘Eight Things You Absolutely Need to Know Before You Even Consider Purchasing a High-Quality Robotic Massage Chair,’ something like that, it’s a long title. Well, I’ve upgraded it to 11 things, and so it’s also got a new look and feel. I reworded a lot of it, I’ve added a lot of content, and it’s a good, good report. It’s not just fluff, and I’m not just trying to, you know, it’s not a bait and switch, it is all just information that you need to know when you’re looking for a massage chair. And I thought of another thing today that I forgot to put in to that report, so we may have to upgrade it to 12, ’12 Things You Absolutely Need to Know,’ but anyway, it’s a great report, so we’ve updated that and you can take a look at that.
[SCREEN TEXT: Current Massage Chair Sales!]
Alan: Now, in terms of sales right now, a lot of the sales that we had in January, almost all of them, or sorry, not in January, in April and May, have been continued on until the end of May, end of June. So, the Kumo is still at $6999, the Ogawa Master Drive AI is still at $7999, the Furniture for Life chairs still have free Lifetime, or not Lifetime, free extended warranties, Osaki has discounts on their, many of their chairs, and extended warranty offers on their chairs. And so anyway, and there’s more, I’m probably not thinking of them all right now, but there are, oh, and there’s some good discontinued deals, like the Infinity Genesis is on sale for $3999, and it’s regularly $7299. That chair has been discontinued, and so they’re selling out their existing stock, and then selling it at an extremely good price. Oh, and the Osaki 4S price dropped from $8, or I think, $9999 down to $6999, that’s a Japanese chair, and but anyway, just to let you know that there are lots of sales. This is a very good time to buy a massage chair because of the pandemic, the massage chair companies are trying to unload inventory that they purchased months before the pandemic hit, and so they’ve got all this inventory, but they got to sell it. So, it’s really a good time. As a matter of fact, people ask me ‘Should I wait until Black Friday, should I wait until July 4th, should I wait until next, or New Year’s, or whatever?’ Don’t, don’t wait, these are some of the best deals I’ve ever seen, so and I think many of my colleagues would agree, it’s a great time to purchase a massage chair. So, take a look at the sales and see what we got cooking.
[SCREEN TEXT: JPMedics Kumo Pearl/Ivory Color Discontinued; Black/Red Added]
Alan: Also, the Kumo, the JPMedics Kumo, they have discontinued the Pearl/Ivory option, and of course, the day after they discontinued it, I had a customer that wanted that color, and we couldn’t get it for him, but they’ve, we have replaced that color with the Black and Red option. Now, the Kumo has always had the white, or pearl exterior color, and then there was a different color inside, whether it was previously white, or espresso, or cappuccino, now they’ve added a black exterior with a red interior. It’s a nice-looking chair, a very handsome chair. So, anyway, I wanted you to know about that. Let’s see what else I can talk about.
[SCREEN TEXT: Massage Chair Relief Welcomes Daiwa Massage Chairs]
Alan: Oh, we’re starting to carry the Daiwa chairs. Daiwa and US Jaclean is the same company. The Daiwa chairs are chairs that are made in a very, very good factory in China, where many of the other well-made chairs are, they come from. And I was introduced to them back in January or February, I can’t remember, it was at the Furniture Market, I think that was February, and they asked me if I’d be interested to come out and visit with them, and I did. And I’d heard of their chairs, of course, people asked me about them because they sell them primarily through trade shows and travel shows, you know, and I’d heard about it, but I really didn’t know anything about them. Well, I learned about them, and was impressed with the company, and they’ve got some pretty good, it’s not just chairs they’ve got that are decent, and the chairs they have are the Pegasus 2, the Legacy 4, and the Solace. They have other models, but those ones, we’ll be carrying, and then when the chair comes out, one called the Hybrid, which has a back roller and a butt roller, separate rollers that when the chair reclines, they’ll be, the chair can flatten out more, so hopefully we’ll get a better stretch. They had a prototype up at the Furniture Market, and I sat on it, and it did seem to offer a pretty good stretch for a modified L-track, if you will. But anyway, we should have those, some, at least, we have the Pegasus in our Utah showroom now, but we should have some of those chairs on the website within the next week.
[SCREEN TEXT: New Inada Robo Chair]
Alan: Also, the new Inada Robo chair is now out. I saw it at CES over a year ago, interesting-looking chair, very cool looking. It has these finger, these arm airbags that looked like kind of fingers that were grabbing your arms. Anyway, that chair is finally available, and Inada, whether you know this or not, Inada USA is now, the distributor for Inada USA is now Osaki/Titan, and so they are selling that chair. And I am an authorized dealer for Osaki/Titan and Inada, but I will not be allowed to carry that chair at this point. There are certain dealers that will have it, but we will not be one of them at this point. But as I learn about the chair, I’ll be happy to answer any questions for you. I’d like to go out to visit Osaki, and sit on it, and have a better experience than I did when I was at CES. So, anyway, that chair is new, and that’s an interesting, a very interesting addition to the massage chair industry here in the United States.
[SCREEN TEXT: Recent Articles on our Blog: 1. Review of JPMedics Kumo; 2. Massage Chairs & Stretching; 3. Massage Chair Memory Function]
Alan: Oh, let’s see what, oh, and I’ve written some articles. As a matter of fact, speaking of the Kumo, I told you about the Kumo earlier, I just wrote a review about it last week, and it’s like a 2000-word review on the Kumo. It’s, as I do with all my reviews, I talk about the experience of the chair, but I also mention some things that are a little bit of a drawback, and I talk about the things that are good, and I’ve done it with this one as well, and I try to be objective. But it’s a pretty popular chair, so we, I figured I’d better get a review out on that one. And with the website redesign, and opening the store in Arizona last year, I haven’t done a lot of chair reviews in a, for many, I haven’t done many over the last, you know, six to eight months. So, I need to do more of those, and so here’s another one. But hopefully, you can read about that, and get some information, and get some you know, understanding of what that chair is like. And in case you’re wondering, JPMedics, Ogawa, and Cozzia are all the same umbrella company, and they’re all made in the same factory, in the Ogawa factory in China, formerly known as East Pau. And I also have an article on massage chair stretching, and I think I talked about this on the last industry update, talked about the, what I have, the nomenclature that I have given stretches from the, you know, typical segmental stretch from the old massage chairs that is still available in certain massage chairs today, you know, like the Panasonic, most of the Japanese-made chairs, and then you’ve got body full extension, a full-body extension stretch, which is typical of S-track chairs, and now you’ve got the L-track chairs, that are trying to mimic the full-body extension, but they’re more of a hip distraction stretch, and then now we’ve got these hybrids coming in, like this one from Daiwa. But by the way, because of the pandemic, and the production slow down in China, that chair, it was supposed to be out now, but it’s going to be out probably in another couple of months, a few months. So, that chair is not even out yet, so don’t be looking too hard for it, or don’t be looking too hard for one to sit in. There’s information out there, but anyway, and then I wrote an article about the memory functions of chairs, and memory functions are not in every chair, and the function, in those chairs that do have it, it varies from chair to chair. So, but you can read my article about memory function, or read my article about stretching to understand what I’m talking about, and of course, if you’re interested in reading my review on the JPMedics Kumo, it’s there for you as well.
[SCREEN TEXT: The Massage Chair Chronicle Newsletter]
Alan: And by the way, I send out a newsletter every week to everybody that downloads my free report, you know, the ’11 Things’ report that I talked about. If you want to be kept up to date on what I’m, what you know, what’s going on in the industry, and on a weekly basis, in a written format, you can download the free report, and I’ll send, it’s called the ‘Massage Chair Chronicle.’ I send it out every week, and you will receive that on a weekly basis with the information that you need. It’s easy to opt out, if you don’t, if you get tired of it, you just opt out or unsubscribe at the bottom of any of the emails.
[SCREEN TEXT: 888-259-5380]
Alan: Oh, but anyway, OK, I think that’s just about it for this week. Lots of stuff, sorry to go off at the beginning. I hope I didn’t turn you off because you’re here to learn about massage chairs and I’m talking about pandemics, and protests, and colonoscopies. But anyway, if you have any questions, feel free to give me a call. You can reach me at 888-259-5380, and while the pandemic’s on, I don’t have full-time staff working in the sales area, so I answer all the calls. So, if you want to talk to me, just give me a ring. You can reach me at that number. Of course, you can also reach us through our chat feature, which on the new website is down in the right-hand corner. You can reach us through our social media platforms, through commentary, or through the ‘Contact Us’ form, which I talked about earlier today, early on this video, or by email. There’s plenty of ways to reach out and find us and contact us. We’re not hiding, by any stretch of the imagination.
[SCREEN TEXT: Please “Thumbs Up” Like This Video!!]
Alan: And if you found this video helpful, please feel free to thumbs up ‘Like’ us on our YouTube channel, and help us spread the word about massage chairs by sharing this video with your friends and family on your various and sundry social media platforms. Well, again, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ and I will see you again in two weeks. Bye bye.
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